The origin of linguistic categories

Abstract

The paper presents cognitive mechanisms and behavioral rules by which a group of distributed autonomous agents may develop a joined shared repertoire of grammatical conventions. The grammar includes an emergent internal meta-level ontology which is exploited for tightening the grammatical constraints. To illustrate the latter, it is shown how a prototypical form for members of a syntactic category may gradually emerge, thus making it easier to guess to which syntactic category an unknown form belongs. 1 Introduction There is a growing body of work exploring the idea that language can be viewed as a complex adaptive system [8], [4]. The research explores formal models of language use in evolving inhomogeneous populations through computational simulations and experiments with physical robotic agents. Shared linguistic conventions have been shown to emerge as attractors of a language dynamics operating over autonomous distributed agents. Each interaction, or language game, involves a spe...